CFP: [Gender Studies] Queer Nature (9/19/07; NeMLA, 4/10-4/13/08)

This panel seeks to explore the productive conjunction between queerstudies and environmental studies crystallized in the problematicâ€"butextremely generativeâ€"notion of â€œqueer nature.â€ It will situate itselfwithin existing scholarship in ecofeminism and queer critiques ofscience, but it will push beyond these limits by exploring the profoundqueerness at the heart of the human and other-than-human world. It will,at once, take seriously queer theorists historical frustration with thenaturalization of nature, especially in terms of the violentrepercussions of naturalizing a heteronormative nature, but it will alsotake seriously environmental theorists call to figure the other-than-human world into our ethico-political theory and praxis. â€œQueer Natureâ€will fill in a gap, a gap sadly, and vaguely, at the core of both queerand environmental studies.

Possible topics include:

â€¢ Queer critiques of deep ecologyâ€¢ Critical engagement with foundational (but untraditional)environmental philosophers, such as Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Deleuzeâ€¢ Queer reassessments of environmental literary historyâ€¢ The sex life of plantsâ€¢ Queer critiques of ecocriticism as a disciplinary formationâ€¢ Darwin, teleology, neo-Darwinism, and alternativesâ€¢ Reproduction and its discontentsâ€¢ The queer phenomenology of ecological touchingâ€¢ Biopolitics, or the political organization of life and deathâ€¢ The problematization of species as a queer phenomenonâ€¢ Lâ€™aperto as queer space

Please send 250-word abstracts to Robert Azzarello atrazzarello_at_gc.cuny.edu by 15 September 2007.